Week of Miracles
by coincident
Summary: So he grew trees the way he grew old, and she set bones the way she set records. Hashirama/Madara, Tsunade. One-shot.


**A/N**: I'm so intrigued by Tsunade's blend of optimism and cynicism, particularly with regards to Sasuke and Orochimaru. It makes me wonder if it...ran in the family.

Enjoy!

* * *

The last person anyone in the worldwants to see when nursing one hangover and calculating the fastest way to have another as soon as possible is one's grandmother, and since the overall shittiness of the week has reached a level sufficient to guarantee that this sort of thing will inevitably occur, Tsunade's thrice-barricaded door finally splinters for the last time under the iron fist of a serene, silk-enrobed Senju Mito, standing there like the immovable rock of ages and killing Tsunade's remaining coherent brain cells by sheer force of intimidation.

"Beg your pardon, obaa-san," ventures Tsunade, "but could you maybe, you know…"

"Come back another time?"

"Yeah..."

"No," says Mito, and shifts her basket. To her horror, Tsunade spots at least three different kinds of cod liver oil deceptively nestled among the cheery store-bought cans of milk. "Not when you're going to invite me in, Tsunade."

"…of course, obaa-san," says Tsunade, blearily rationalizing that certain battles are better not fought, talked about, or acknowledged in any way. She stabs her foot at the door, knocking it open, and lets her grandmother sweep in. Mito never walks anywhere. She sweeps, glides, or soars as the occasion demands. Tsunade allows this to happen because contemplating alternative action is something that, at the moment, is completely beyond her capacity.

"Sit," says Mito. "I'll make you something to take with your—"

"_Not _cod liver oil," moans Tsunade. "_Please_, obaa-san…"

"If you're old enough to inebriate yourself every fortnight," continues Mito, "you're old enough to take your medicine and not whine like a child every time this happens. Get out of my kitchen."

"It's _my _kitchen," gripes Tsunade, but her grandmother turns, _stares _at her like some kind of undead creature, and then, by some feat of post-drunken trick vision, mitotically divides into two Mitos, both wearing the same portentious glare. Tsunade backs out of the kitchen slowly, taking care not to make any loud noises, and then flops over onto her couch. A particularly garish vomit stain stares back up at her from the upholstery. Fucking beautiful.

"—child's left the village again, taken a search party—"

"Jiraiya's a fucking moron," comes out of her mouth, no cognition involved in the process.

"Tsunade."

"What?"

"_Language_."

"Obaa-san—"

Mito comes back out with a huge serving spoon of cod liver oil.

"That's not—"

"It's a teaspoonful," says Mito serenely. "Drink up."

Tsunade plants her feet against the couch's armrest, wrenches her eyes shut, and swallows.

She has to get through the requisite amount of vitriolic bitching to make up for the fact that, as always, she feels a little better instantly, and, as always, her mouth tastes likes someone has turned her intestines inside out and left them under her tongue, and, as always, she's hit at once with all the things she spent last night getting systematically shitfaced in order to forget and, as fucking _always_, her grandmother just sits there, untouched and untouchable, eyeing her with that unreadable expression that somehow still manages to convey a distinct aura of _or else. _She shoves six years' worth of heavy blonde hair out of her eyes and puts her face in her hands.

She'll be all right because she knows the drill. Six hours of lazing, of tangling and untangling knotted-up hair, of finding food without moving components involved, of avoiding the inevitability of shopping and the sixth _Report to Hokage _notice that week, of trip-wiring the roof and the windows to keep concerned neighbors out—and then the evening will come and she can leave, get lost, end the night in some sewer somewhere before someone has the gall to drag her back out again.

Her grandmother keeps saying things like, "You are twenty-five years old, and your world isn't going to end because _that boy _left, child."

There's only one _that boy_, of course. He used to be _that nice boy_, back when he was just a weird-faced brat with straight hair and a crooked mind, but, funnily enough, a stint of illegal genetic experimentation warps more than morals; the vagaries of village semantics change overnight, and every ninja on the premises seems to have forgotten how Orochimaru was the goddamn golden boy of Konoha just last week. Of course, they didn't know about Aibara and the experiments and a hundred other things, didn't know, so every careful bouquet of praise was paid for and justified. She still isn't sure how much of an excuse that is. She isn't quite ready to tackle the question without a few more ounces of alcohol in her bloodstream and a few more chips in her fingers, waiting for the clink of dice.

"Obaa-san," she tries again. "Did you just come to rub this in my face, or what?"

"In a manner of speaking," says Mito. "I came to give you this."

She sets the basket on the table, and at a closer look, Tsunade is able to discern that the cans of milk are laid artistically over something else—a blue furoshiki swathed around something large and rectangular. Some kind of box, she supposes. Wonderful. She likes presents, likes them even better when they're not moralizing or subtly reproachful, as Mito's presents are wont to be.

"Great," she says, "Thanks, obaa-san."

When Mito is gone, she pulls a blanket over herself, not bothering to get dressed, and lets herself sweat out the rest of the pummelled-to-the-bones feeling. She's not stupid enough to leave pictures of her genin team lying around, but after Dan and Nawaki's deaths she realized that she wasn't cut out for the art of the purge—burning bridges as easily as letters, showing the world how good she was at leaving the ones who left her. Orochimaru's little protégé, on the other hand, seems to have taken her lessons to heart. Tsunade saw her in the bars a few nights, too, looking entirely too young for her seat on some older dockworker's lap, but Mitarashi Anko seems to have grown disgusted with the game of self-delusion and has since emerged clean and raw on the other side, already forcing her small body to mend its fissures. Tsunade envies her, but at the same time—resentment, _little bitch_, what right does she have to grieve, and really, if she allows herself to think like the hateful human being this mess has made of her—to _heal_, before Tsunade herself?

But consideration of Mitarashi Anko and the scar she keeps covered isn't doing much for Tsunade's day-long routine, which involves staving off homicidal Orochimaru-related musings with as much white noise as possible. She reaches for her grandmother's basket and snaps open one of the flavored milk cans, and as she does, her eyes fall on the package.

It's a plain wooden box, which is surprising, since Mito is formal to a fault and usually sends her correspondences in lacquered cases that invariably slip from fingers and shatter before anything useful can be done with them. The note on top explains:

_These belonged to your grandfather._

This, of course, renders the entire gift even _more _fundamentally unappreciated, since Tsunade has no desire to engage in any bouts of voyeuristic nostalgia over whatever undoubtedly saintly thing her grandfather did that Mito wants her to know about, and particularly not now, still smarting from Orochimaru and sorting out what the hell she's supposed to think about the entire stupid mess before Sarutobi gets fed up and fires her ass. But she pops the latch and slides the lid open anyway, because what the hell. A few handwritten letters fall into her lap. When she squints at the dates, she realizes they aren't letters, but two daily progress reports of the sort all jonin are required to keep on field missions. She has quite a few herself, including the truly epic Amegakure travelogue Jiraiya threw together, which she'll never admit is more scintillating and adroitly written than about half the garbage she pages through at Konoha's sole bookstall.

The first account in the sheaf of leaves, interestingly, isn't from a field mission at all, but from one of the tiny hamlets at Konoha's borders. Pointless. The ceiling fan hums, dull thunks, plastic axeblades making chunks of the air in her apartment. Outside, the sounds she associates with sunlight, although she knows there's little relationship—hawkers, the civilian couple next door arguing in pointed subterranean tones. The day will slip by like molasses, syrupy-slow and too sweet in its banality.

There's nothing else to do. She wraps the stifling blanket tighter around herself, smudges a trickle of sweat from her nose, and begins to read.

**~X~**

No one in Endou has seen him.

Hashirama isn't surprised. His cousin, a genjutsu genius, has always told him that the naked eye is the worst possible medium with which to perceive anything important, and this little village of skeptical peasants and superstitious old men, fearful of ninjutsu, misses more than most. But, because he is Konoha's illustrious leader, he bows lower than he probably should and thanks them anyway, and because he is Konoha's illustrious leader, he gives them a copper or two for their trouble, and because he is Konoha's illustrious leader, he goes back to the little room he's been given in the town's best guesthouse and puts his head on his table, too worried to stop the search, too bone-weary to continue it.

He thinks that he has maybe a day before Tobirama catches up with him, perhaps more if Uzumaki Mito is kind enough to scramble his trail so that even his brother doesn't know where he's gone. It wouldn't be difficult. He has no destination in mind. And when he was taught, facing the wall of red-armored relatives, didn't they tell him that this sort of enemy—the aimless, the dangerously flexible—was always the most difficult to track?

But Madara, is never—has never been, doesn't know how to be—aimless. For this reason, not knowing where he's gone is almost an insult to Hashirama, as if he never knew the other boy well enough to puzzle out a destination from simple clues. Madara is a taut piston of flesh and fire. He has nowhere to go but forward, and like the tail of a comet pulled behind him, so Hashirama goes too, unable to pull himself from a motion that seems as inevitable as the moon in its orbit. Of course, the guilt comes at this. He looks at the sodden Hokage's robes wrapped unceremoniously and shoved into his satchel.

Unreal. There is nothing real about it. Two days ago, the inaugaration, and then, the leaving.

_You are a fool_, Hashirama says, looking down at his hands. _Womanly and foolish; he left the village, and you are behaving as if—_

_As if_, and there, the thought he can't say, a lit night-lamp burning down to the midnight oil.

Shredded parchment next to him gives testimony to his many attempts at writing an official letter. He has arguments marshaled up in his mind like the elder branches he uses for ranged attacks. Elder is the truest wood he knows. No spaces between the grain, spiraling rings that both hide and simultaneously reveal the trees' age like prostitutes' white makeup; wood has its words too, and elder says _all that's left to do is destroy_. He would fashion his arguments of elder wood. Three-pointed tridents:

_If we let him wander, he is a danger to our village._

_He may be marshalling a force to attack._

_He must be prevented from reaching and forming an alliance with another country._

Arguments of the sort the Hokage should wield and in fact _will, _standing in front of the roomful of men or letting his brother read the letter, while he waits for morning to come so that he can leave in Madara's pursuit again. They're good arguments. Probably true. No one would suspect, of course, that they mean something slightly different.

_If I let him wander, he will be a danger to himself._

_If he were to attack, I am not at all sure I would be able to destroy him._

_I won his loyalty for Konoha, and only for Konoha._

Konoha's Shodaime puts his head in his hands and rubs sleep from his eyes. It has no business there, not when Madara is waiting to be found. Like a film over the stubborn advent of tiredness is the image of the leaving—not faded, as of yet, like the daguerrotype photograph of Konoha's inaugaration, almost viciously clear in its unrelenting details. Hair feathered over Madara's shoulder, the lonely jut of the fan like a sage's fishing pole—and the kusarigama with its long chain, clanking a solemn dark-blue note as Hashirama tried so hard to pull the correct words from the fractured glass his thoughts had become. The trouble was that there never should have been any, between friends; a _stay _should have sufficed, a _why _should have been enough, a _please _should have halted those walking footsteps in their trail.

None of them, of course, had done this. It was the first time the weapons at his command had so thoroughly failed him.

But this thought, too, has no place. Madara must be found. For the village or for himself, and he already knows, as a competent leader must, that the distinction is a sign of his own failure. He brushes the reasons aside and sets brush to parchment. The others will understand. He will be back, he will fulfill his responsibilities, but first—

—but first, he _must _bring Madara home.

**~X~**

The thing that scares Tsunade more than anything is that the entry for Endou Village is only six sentences long, and two of them consist of nothing but the date and place. She had scanned the entire package looking for something that must have been left out, but that was it: six sentences, the last a simple statement of facts: _We will both be back in Konoha before the week is out. _

"It's hard to believe," she says the next day, to Jiraiya, who has returned from his latest fruitless search and still looks mildly shell-shocked that she allowed him to visit. He says nothing about the look or smell of the apartment. She's grateful in a punch-on-the-shoulder way, because it looks like shit and so does she, but as long as he understands that this is the way things are going to be for a while—he'll look like shit in the woods on wild goose chases, and she'll look like shit in her apartment, clinging like a barnacle to a rotting boat—they'll be okay, they'll get past That Fucker, Idiot, Shit-for-Brains, Nice Boy Orochimaru like they got past war and dead brothers and a thousand things besides.

"It's hard to believe," she says again, more insistently. He's dozing on his feet, still in fatigues. "I mean, the new Hokage just _leaves_ to go after his batshit terrorist friend. Did he really think the council back home would be okay with this?"

"Do you have alcohol?" mutters Jiraiya, not listening. She nearly breaks his teacup over his head. She doesn't even know why he's holding a fucking teacup; she doesn't make tea, and the only person who uses her chinaware is her grandmother, who likes to drink things like water with rose leaves in it. She supposes Jiraiya's thickheadedness is a consequence of the last few nights in the wilderness tracking That Fucker, who will never, as she knows very well, allow himself to be found if he doesn't see a point to it.

So maybe Jiraiya isn't the best-equipped to understand about why her grandfather's view on Uchiha Madara was, well—fucking stupid.

When he's gone, she leaves her apartment for the first time in days, just to think. The Shodai's travelogue she keeps folded up in her back weapons pouch, because it's field notes, and they're always useful to someone at some point. She isn't quite sure where her feet are going. Memorial grounds, hospital, Hokage Tower, and that makes sense, because it's there that she remembers him most clearly. In the later years of his life, he had had a skein of grey hair that fascinated her, the way it cut like a river through the rest of his hair. She used to pull on it. It had never seemed part of him the way the dark locks did—he was about fifty when he died, and grey hair was expected, but he had always looked so agelessly young to her that she had never thought of it this way.

"Are they _real_?" she had asked, over and over, entranced by the color. He had shaken his head. "Then what are they?"

"They're made of memories," was his reply. "Things you can't forget."

"You keep them in your _hair_?"

He'd laughed. Grandfathers, she thinks now, are supposed to have booming laughs, punctuated by slaps on the thigh, but his was nothing more than a pleased shuttering of eyes. She wasn't bothered by it.

"It's better," he'd said, "than keeping them in here."

He'd tapped the front of his armor, next to his heart. She put her own hand over his, trying to feel that secret place between the roots, and the heat of his palm over hers is something she still remembers very well. She has never asked her grandmother for stories. All she needs of the Shodai is this: a large hand over a small one, a quiet pleasure like the flavorful core of a fruit, silver-threaded memories slipping through her fingers.

She can see some of those memories now, and she isn't sorry for it. On the grass before the Hokage Tower she fists her hands in a pile of dead leaves, strews them around, just to make it look a little cluttered.

The trouble is, she is able to say _Uchiha Madara _the way the villagers now are able to say _that boy_, and she knows it isn't quite fair to those left behind. Behind every syllable or averted glance is an accusation. She was his teammate; it was, on some level, her responsibility to prevent him from doing what he did, and this half-articulated guilt, more than anything, is what propels her into the bar most nights, looking for the answer just inside the lip of every bottle. Thick glass and thicker skin; that's what the nights since his leaving have been made of—but there's always the moment, like the quicksilver miss in a game of dice, that might have changed Orochimaru's decision, and that moment now sits under the deck, drawn, its potentiality spent. She—and Jiraiya, and Sarutobi—had the power to seize that moment, and so it is only fitting that, if there were a chance to redeem him, she'd take it without a second thought. As her grandfather might have done. As her grandfather, in actuality, _did_.

And the reason there were only six sentences, she thinks, is because he had considered this so obvious there had been no further need for explanation.

The sky is turning a strange shade of violet. She flicks at a leaf with one red-lacquered nail. Then she draws the travelogue out and flips the stack over for the other log. This is dated two days later, to Saisen, a fishing village just on the border between the Water and Fire countries.

She settles herself against the pile of firewood logs. Other shinobi amble about, doing mundane tasks, living their mundane lives. She brushes a wetness she doesn't want to consider from her eyes, and then she reads.

**~X~**

He finds him in Saisen. It's neither chance or skill—it's a pause, for one moment, as if Madara lingers on the border between one world and the next and looks over his shoulder at the sound of Hashirama's cries. A ragtag harbor in the afternoon, sails like spread arms. Poured wind, sea-scented breath, nothing as it should be but the five fingers on Hashirama's arm. He catches himself saying things he shouldn't be saying,_ come back_, _you can't be doing this_, _take the position if you want it, I don't need it, I don't need anything_.

Madara's always been the better at debate, and his arguments are much sharper.

_This isn't about that anymore._

_You can't understand what it's like. _

"Is it about your brother?" asks Hashirama. "Izuna-san wouldn't have—"

Madara's hand moves like a viper, slides up his shoulder and briefly dances across his chest before coming to rest lightly at his neck. Cool red eyes, so deceptively calm for the madness he can feel emanating from under Madara's fingertips.

"Go back to your Konoha," says Madara. "Don't talk about things you don't understand."

And then Hashirama is angry too; nothing world-ending, just an old wind catching in the scattered leaves left behind. What he wants from Madara is something he can neither understand nor articulate: the heady rush of watching as the other boy sniped about food or awkwardly held bolts of cloth against himself, unaccustomed to so much finery set aside for him—one slender palm upheld as he waved to Konoha's citizens, that disdainful mouth still murmuring its venomous jibes even as he closed it with his own on the fifth night since truce. Peace was the shape of Madara's body then, its individual clauses enumerated and ensured in the individual nubs of Madara's spine. Something felt. Thin shoulders moving against his, small lips mouthing conditions and reservations, the warmth that jumped beneath Madara's skin as though it was a force and not a person in Hashirama's arms, something not quite human.

He is angry because Madara has, for whatever reason of his own, taken these things from him, and he is no leader in the end, just a lover who is selfishly, furiously angry—for as long as Madara runs from his own happiness, he knows he will not be able to hold on to his own either.

"The next time you meet me, do it honestly," says Madara. "I will come back to Konoha only once."

You cannot, Hashirama thinks, run from the world that uplifts you for a person such as this. He closes his eyes, is nearly sick with the sadness, the unfamiliar anger.

"Come, then," says Hashirama, knowing this answer isn't at all what he wanted. "I'll be ready for you."

Madara kisses him, only because he has never passed up an opportunity to mock what Hashirama believes is true. His lips are the same. Some things are different, but Hashirama knows Madara has never given any value to these things, so it fails to matter.

He is ready—or something like it—for the last time.

**~X~**

Tsunade knows her history. She knows that, had there been another log, it would have been dated five days later, and placed at the Valley of the End.

When she goes home, she clears the dirty bottles from her sink. She puts her trash outside next to her neighbors'. She flings curtains wide and washes her dishes, letting soap trickle all the way down to the floor. She figures that, as long as the tiles are dirty, she might as well wash them. So she scours and she soaks and she wrings the rag into the bucket so sharply she nearly tears it in half. It doesn't matter. It'll look nice when she comes back from work in the morning; if Sarutobi sends another notice it'll probably cause heart failure or something, so she might as well go. She might as well take a look at Jiraiya's search team, probably all the worse for wear after Orochimaru and his stupidity, and after that—there _is _an entire wing of hospital victims set aside for treatment, all complaining of black marks or bloodline transplants that didn't take and other atrocities that need a medic. She's okay with that. That's her job.

She guesses she's her grandfather's girl, because she knows that to be left by someone like Orochimaru or Madara is to live for a short while in the week of miracles—a few days during which, for better or for worse, belief flares brighter than anything around it and simply refuses to extinguish no matter what the evidence says, no matter how insistently her village howls for Orochimaru's blood. She knows, because for the last few days she's been going through the motions believing that—_miracles_—her ex-teammate might come back to Konoha, pick up a new hitai-ate at the genin-issue store, have the requisite awkward reunion with herself and Jiraiya and make up for it by getting everyone atrociously and appallingly drunk. And then, confusing appendages and articles of clothing, they might make it back, the crash of their bottles behind them like stranded stars, weaving a little ditty or two between lurches, and Orochimaru might apologize, and Jiraiya might cry like the stupid fucking sap he is, and she might bash their heads together to hide the fact that she might be crying too. Anything can happen in that golden stretch of time, when he hasn't yet done anything beyond redemption—and someday there might be only a few people in the village who believe that, but she's his best friend, and so, at least for the week, she'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Her grandfather did, and she will too.

And if not—

—if not, she decides, she is a Senju_, _and if her _grandparents_ could fuck up Uchiha Madara and his Kyuubi like nobody's business—well, she isn't beyond breaking a few bones either.

**~X~**

_end_


End file.
